


Waters of Aegeus

by Aja



Category: Lords of Discipline - Pat Conroy
Genre: Gen, M/M, Yuletide, Yuletide 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 08:06:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tradd has known many men like Will McLean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waters of Aegeus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jae Gecko](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jae+Gecko).



Will McLean is one of those men who can walk into a room and shift the mood instantly. Tradd has known many men like that: he has watched them in his mother's sitting room, sipping demitasses, their smiles altering the tone of his mother's laugh or the way she tilts her head; he has watched them on yachts and in gardens, at Sunday brunches and debutante balls, always with their easy strides and cool, ready laughs. They are the kind of men who sport their masculinity casually, draped over their personalities like the cloak of a military uniform, perfectly groomed and ready to wear.

Tradd's father is not like that. Tradd's father's manliness precedes him into a place by at least ten of his quick heavy paces. Will McLean enters a room quietly, but Tradd always notices his presence. It is quite unlike the way he sometimes forgets, when faced with his father's sheer, overpowering sense of himself, that there is a person behind the persona at all.

Will enters their room at the Institute with confidence, the mess hall and the barracks with a touch of bravado. He sidles into Tradd's house, always a bit uneasy. Tradd clings to Will's unease because it reminds him--reminds him of his own, the faint inexorable creeping fear of not-belonging that hangs over him, the fear that hangs over them both like the most famous chandelier in South Carolina whenever the two of them enter the St. Croix mansion together.

Only then they part, drift away from one another: Will straightens his shoulders and laughs and pulls out his gentle, easy humor. Will is like stepping out of doors on a cool spring evening in Charleston, a hundred flowers seducing your senses before you can adjust to the difference in the air. Will McLean wins people over before they have realized even the idea of him. Tradd has never been like that; he draws people to him only to mock, to criticize, to doubt. Tradd deflects the criticism, most of the time; he stays focused on the words he speaks, the fine line between delicacy and indifference--he clings to the propriety that Will seems to have never quite mastered.

Will has never known what Tradd knows--about himself, about his family. Will thinks there is an untouchable purity to Tradd, to all of them, and especially to Tradd's mother; maybe even to Charleston itself. What Tradd knows is that they are, all of them, like the Institute, corrupted and tarnished, chained for centuries, chained by instinct, to propriety. To hanging only original art on the walls and toasting with the waters of the Aegean; as if the value of the gift is worth more than the value of the giving; as if the waters are not fetid and toxic with unmentionable sins.

So Abigail takes Will for long walks to ensure that he receives a proper Charlestonian social education, and then refuses to let Tradd talk to Annie Kate when she calls at night, anxious and lonely. And Tradd pretends to be deeply upset by these moments, ignoring the relief fighting to break over him--the relief mingled with disgust that even here, even here he cannot be a man, even here he has to allow his mother--his _mother_ \--to protect him from another woman.

Tradd thinks of Theresa, of Pig kissing her picture reverently every night. He thinks, _If I were a man I would do the same for Annie Kate._ Sometimes he dreams of her, and even in his dreams he can remember the smell of her, her perfume, the scent of her body as she huddled close to him after. He never wonders if it's love. Love may be a thousand things to him but Annie Kate fills him with a tired, worn-out dread. Sometimes when he has thought of her too much he thinks he would like to experience something new, to _feel_ something new. But those are thoughts for men like Will, men who are safe, who can be at ease with their own private rebellions.

Tradd's private rebellions are not the thoughts of St. Croix men, or Charleston men, or Southern men, or men of the Institute.

Five months into their plebe year, Tradd had broken. It was nearing the end of January, and Charleston was a gloomy, oppressive port whose ships had all sailed or docked for the winter. The part of his father's son that longed to be on the open water and free was reaching its breaking point. The cadre had hit him hard that morning--not hard enough, never hard enough, he knew that--but they had chipped away at him steadily, and on this cold day something in him had cracked open and spilled out like an unsustainable lie.

Will had found him that night, half-naked and sobbing, the way the cadre had chosen to leave him on that particular afternoon of humiliation. Of all the horror, all the torture and abuse that Tradd underwent that year, the thing he remembers most about freshman year at the Institute is that moment, the moment of Will's touch. The moment when Will McLean put his hand on Tradd's shoulder; the moment when Will ran his fingers over the bare column of his spine, slid a warm palm over his hair, reached arms around him and held him, held him without words until he was safe and whole and himself again.

Tradd knows little about love, unless it is love for the South, of Charleston and his mother and her poised and fragrant rose gardens--the understanding of generations of St. Croix, passed down through heirlooms and land and tradition. Love is staying power, love is permanence, love is about what lasts. Annie Kate and the confusing, embarrassing things they did together--those things have never lingered with him. They had already begun to fade in the moment he and Annie Kate had slid messily, awkwardly apart.

Will McLean's touch has permanence. Will McLean's touch has stayed with him every moment since their plebe year. Sometimes when the pressure of the name has gotten to him, when the academic demands of the school are at their most intense, when the tension between Pig and Mark is particularly volatile--sometimes when Tradd is at his darkest he remembers that touch, the enveloping physical moment of it, just by closing his eyes. Sometimes he thinks that Will McLean's arms around him in that moment are the only reason the Institute didn't break him that year, after all. Sometimes he thinks he stayed for reasons that had nothing to do with proving himself. Sometimes he wonders what it means.

Sometimes at his darkest, Tradd wonders what he would go through, or what he would be willing to put others through, to have that again.

Charleston in the fall smells of fading honeysuckle and sumac, a rich, heady smell, slightly bitter, but powerful. Tradd thinks of this, of Charleston and fall and his final year, his final year at the Institute. He thinks of how far they have come: he, Mark, Pig and Will. He and Will.

Sometimes he wonders what this final year will bring. Then he thinks of himself and Will, and Will's arm around his back, of white-sailed ships departing for open waters, of fall turning into winter into spring, fragrant and glorious and new. He thinks, _Will is with me, will be with me._

He sees the path to the future, _their_ future, straight and clear.

 

 

 


End file.
